*About*

This is a collaborative archive blog launched by Professor Marina Hassapopoulou, and co-created with students from the past 6 years. The blog focuses on research and creative projects on interactive and ephemeral media. This is a non-institutionalized, open access attempt at collective historiography and experimental forms of writing. The Interactive Media Archive has grown into a non-traditional, multi-subjective and multi-cultural open research resource that currently has over 119,400 views.

Student projects and labor are typically undervalued within the Humanities and now the Digital Humanities. This collaborative, student-driven archive instead highlights how important student contributions are in building new resources for research and creative development.

Why this archive? Interactive media and their reception contexts are difficult to archive — there is always an element missing in indirect & second-hand encounters: the interactivity itself. Therefore, this site serves the dual purpose of preserving the memory, history, and meta-media of these often neglected works, and of reflectively creating a repository that proposes several approaches to writing about — and capturing — the sociocultural dynamics of interactivity.

Unsolicited submissions and other contributions are welcomed. Contact site administrator for guidelines.

FOR CONTRIBUTORS:

Please remember to add your name on your page.

Guidelines for posting:

[USERNAME AND PASSWORD CAN BE FOUND ON THE HARD COPY OF THE SYLLABUS]

This blog will serve as a collective archive for our course (for blog entries and software links). Each of you will be posting a blog entry on this website. You will be given a username and password, which will give you access to this blog so you can edit and post your entries. The main assignment you will post in a new page will be the Blog Post (BP). You should copy and paste your text to a Word document because you will need to also turn in a hard copy (minus images and links, WITH citations of all sources used).

Instructions for Fall 2016 bloggers:

>> Blog Posts (BP)are due every Thursday before class, and a hard copy of the text portion (i.e. minus any images/videos) must be turned in at the beginning of class. Each student will post one blog post (750-1000 words) to the shared class blog, which can be accessed here: https://interactivemediaarchive.wordpress.com. (You can also repost your BP to your own blog in order to build an online portfolio of your work). You will log in to WordPress.com to post your blog, using the username and password on the first page of the syllabus. On Week 3, you will sign up for a specific date and that will be your deadline to post. The blog post will cover an interactive medium (e.g. an event, an art piece, or an iPhone app) that is not listed on the class syllabus and has not been covered in class. You must also incorporate at least one assigned reading into the analysis of your chosen medium to show how it relates to critical and theoretical aspects of the course. The objective of this assignment is two-fold: you will be given the opportunity to expand the scope of the course through your findings, and, at the same time, you will be contributing to a collective archive of interactive works. Before posting your blog, browse through all the blogs posted before yours, and ask the students posting on the same day as you for their topic in order to avoid covering the same topic as someone else. Relevant events in NYC will be announced to give you a chance to cover a broader spectrum of interactive media. More details on this assignment will be given in class and posted online. The last chance to submit a blog post is Week 10, Thursday, Nov. 10.

>> The objective of this assignment is two-fold: you will be given the opportunity to expand the scope of the course through your findings, and – at the same time – you will be contributing to a collective archive of interactive works (with currently over 99,000 views). Before posting your blog, browse through all the blogs posted before you, and ask the students posting on the same day as you for their topic in order to avoid covering the same work as someone else. Please cite all your sources at the end of your post, and add hyperlinks to online media used. Don’t forget to save your work in a Word document because you will need to also turn in a hard copy in class. It is recommended that you initially type your text in a Word document and then copy and paste it to WordPress to make sure your work is saved. The preferred browser to use for WordPress is Firefox or Internet Explorer because those browsers allow you to resize images more easily than Chrome or Safari.

>> Instructions on how to post and edit your blog will be given in class as part of a WordPress tutorial. If you have not used WordPress before, allow yourself enough time to play around with the editing and posting tools to make sure your blog entry looks just the way you want it. DO NOT MODIFY EXISTING PAGES!

MAKE SURE YOU POST ON A NEW PAGE. To do this, access the DASHBOARD (left-hand side of page) and click on PAGES >> ADD NEW PAGE. Shortcut: Click on the blog image on the top left-hand corner of page, then scroll down to New, then click on Page. Add a title to your page (the title of the work you are presenting or, if too long, a shorter title). MAKE SURE YOU INCLUDE YOUR NAME on your page and the TOTAL WORD COUNT (excluding Works Cited list).

Adding images: Use the Add Media icon [see screenshot above], then Add New to upload an image from your computer (recommended – simply find an image online if you don’t have it saved on your computer,.e.g. via Google Images, click View Image, then Save As on your computer to upload it to WordPress). To embed a video or .gif [moving image], find the URL and copy-paste it after clicking Add via URL. *Note: if the video embedding feature isn’t working, here is a brief tutorial on how to embed video from youtube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gJVzHrzw9pg

Embedding video: WordPress now automatically embeds videos from sites such as YouTube. All you have to do is copy-paste the URL on a separate line and do not hyperlink it. Your video should pop up on the page automatically, provided that it’s from a site WordPress embeds from. (More info here: https://codex.wordpress.org/Embeds )